AUSTRALIANS AT WAR

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Sunday, July 30, 2006

It is very difficult to see how Israel can actually avoid attacking Syria. They and their US backers have set up Syria as the proverbial monster which they now have no option but to destroy. To a certain extent the same applies to Iran though, because Syria is closer, the logistics of Israel striking Syria are a lot less complex than trying to attack Iran, something the Israelis would prefer the US to do for them.

I stated in an earlier article that the Israelis are playing an extremely dangerous game.[1] I said this in the context that Israel, if they continued pushing their weight around in the way that they are, will at some stage have to rely on some sort of major support from the US, particularly if the Syrians and/or the Iranians are physically drawn into the conflict.

However, the game that they are playing at the moment in Lebanon is not one that they can possibly win in the end, despite their military superiority, even if they shattered all of Lebanon by bombing it and then invading and occupying it from the south.

In invading Lebanon they will simply force Hizbollah to move northwards. Syria then will continue to arm them and Hizbollah will continue to respond to Israeli occupation by launching attacks against the occupying Israelis from their side of the Israeli created ‘buffer zone’ which, of necessity, will then need to be continually increased.

The Israeli strategy of hitting Lebanese infrastructure and calling it ‘Hizbollah infrastructure’ in the hope that Hizbollah will crumble does not work because Hizbollah are not buildings or bridges or roads or airports but people. So far the Israelis have succeeded in killing well over 400 people; very few of them, however, are actually Hizbollah fighters. Rather than hit Hizbollah where it hurts, Israel in fact has done a very good job of demolishing what little goodwill the Lebanese people did have toward the Israelis. The Israelis can kiss that goodbye for many years to come. Israel has also succeeded in creating a new generation of Hizbollah fighters and volunteers. If Israel continues its occupation of southern Lebanon as it did before, then these new recruits will be the ones they will need to face in the future as they avenge the loss of parents, homes, land, jobs and ‘infrastructure’.

Meanwhile, Hizbollah will continue its battle against the Israelis as the Israelis attempt to create their buffer zone and to consolidate their position inside of southern Lebanon. The US has allowed the Israelis time to do this by simple virtue of Condoleeza Rise not being in any rush to either demand that the Israelis halt their attacks or to convene further meetings to discuss how a peace plan can be put in place. How this can be done without any of the major players like Hizbollah, Syria or Iran being involved remains to be answered.[2]

It is this factor that goes to the heart of the problem; there will be a diplomatic stalemate during which period the Israelis will continue to push into Lebanon. The Israelis clearly will do no deals with Hizbollah and Hizbollah will not be budging or giving away their land without a fight – a fight that inevitably will draw in Syria.

From the Israeli side there are some that are able to see that indeed Israel will have to attack Syria with some extreme right-wing Zionists insisting that the sooner this is done the better. Efraim Inbar, for example, an Israeli academic with neoconservative connections in the US and who advises the Israeli government, told Aljazeera.net “I advocate attacking Syria – to some extent we are wasting ammunition in Lebanon.” When asked if the peace process is now dead he replied, “Forget about it, it’s over.”[3] Whether or not Inbar was privy to the Israeli government’s long term plans to attack Lebanon is not known, though, had he had any input to such planning, he would clearly have advocated taking on Syria as well or attacking Syria directly.

The problem with that scenario is that Israel would have had to have set up a pretext for doing so that would have to have been far more plausible than the story that their attack on Lebanon was in response to the capture of a couple of Israeli soldiers after Hizbollah fighters had ‘crossed into Israel’. (We now know, of course, that in fact the Israeli soldiers had actually crossed in to Lebanon when they were arrested[4] and that the Israelis had planned their attack on Lebanon long before the Israeli soldiers were captured.[5])

The big problem as far as the Israelis are concerned is that a wide enough buffer zone would have to be created that would out-range any missile that Hizbollah have. This would be almost impossible without over-running Lebanon entirely since no matter where the Israelis are in Lebanon, Hizbollah will always be able to launch their missiles against them even if it’s into occupied territory. Israel, with all its military superiority, does not have anywhere near the wherewithal to be able to launch a full scale invasion and occupation of all of Lebanon to be able to succeed in eliminating Hizbollah. Nor indeed would Syria allow it to.

The buzz words now coming from Israel, the US and their Western and Arab allies is of a ‘sustainable peace’.[6] It has, however, become a euphemism serving two purposes. First, it buys more time for the Israelis to continue attacking Lebanon because the Israelis, the US and their allies have said that there is no point in having an immediate ceasefire until a ‘sustainable peace’ can be achieved. Second, one needs to ask; what does a sustainable peace actually mean? On what terms would a ‘sustainable peace’ be achieved? Does ‘sustainable peace’, from the Israelis point of view, mean that they continue to have the upper hand in controlling the Palestinians and their lands and unilaterally making decisions about where borders are going to be?

And, of course, therein lies the rub. The only terms on which Israel are likely to disengage are those that see Hizbollah not just disarmed, but dismantled as an organisation bearing in mind that the US, Israel and their Western allies regard Hizbollah as a ‘terrorist’ organisation. This simply will not happen.

The other question that needs to be asked is; with whom will this ‘sustainable peace’ be negotiated? Clearly Syria and Iran will need to be at the table. But this is hardly likely to occur considering the stance Israel and Iran have adopted against each other.

The Rome meeting of 26 July 2006 that was arranged to discuss how a ‘sustainable peace’ might be organised ended in failure with no agreement being reached other than an agreement that somehow at some time an agreement does have to be reached. On the major issue of who should and shouldn’t be involved, there was major disagreement between the UN and the US. The UNs Koffi Anan, furious over the deaths of four UN peacekeepers deliberately killed by the Israelis, insists that Syria and Iran must be involved in talks while Rice insisted they should not be involved because of their ‘role in the region’.[7] Meanwhile, in Lebanon, the Gaza and the West Bank the killing goes on unabated.[8]

The only ‘sustainable peace’ that will be acceptable to the Israelis and their US allies is one where Israel continues to occupy and annex the Gaza and the West Bank on a permanent basis without interference from the Palestinians, the Lebanese or any of the surrounding Arab states – particularly Syria.

Every day that now goes by puts the Israelis in an increasingly weaker position despite its military superiority. As Neil MacFarquhar of the New York Times reports, “with each passing day, the sight of an Arab force hitting Israel with rockets makes Hezbollah increasingly popular across the region and therefore more costly to restrain, particularly because the Israelis have labelled the struggle a death match.”[9]

Israel has expended a massive amount of effort to achieve their aims of eliminating Hizbollah without any success whatsoever. All they have achieved is massive amounts of civilian deaths in Lebanon, massive amounts of damage to the Lebanese people’s infrastructure, and they have brought death and destruction upon themselves in doing so.

The aim of the Israeli attack on Hizbollah and the Lebanese people was to drag the Syrians into the war and get the US to attack Iran.

This is still yet to come. The Israelis had not expected Hizbollah to resist as long as they have in the face of such terrible bombardment and invasion without asking Syrian forces to help directly defend Lebanon. The Israelis, unable to accept their own surprise losses in their limited invasion of southern Lebanon, have faltered and reverted to aerial and artillery bombardment. They are losing in Lebanon despite the massive damage and loss of life. They now either need to pull back entirely and sue for peace or attack Syria and hope that the US will attack Iran.

Either way it will all end in disaster all round. Particularly for the Israeli people.

Thursday, July 20, 2006

Here are a couple of examples of Australian right-wing pro-Zionist hate speech as used by the Australian wing of the ‘Israeli Lobby’.

There’s this from Noelene Konstandinitis, an Australian Israeli pro-Zionist blogger that has posted at Webdiary and Harry Heidelberg’s, from Heidelberg’s blog:

“Of course it is EXCELLENT news that Israel is FINALLY sticking up for itself!What neither the Pals, nor the western bourgeois left, seems to be able to get their think [sic] heads around is that Israel could have destroyed Egypt, Syria, AND Jordan AND kicked the Pals out in 1948, 56, 67, 73, etc. The only thing stopping them every single time was the US!All this would have been over DECADES over [sic], if the U.S. had just let nature take its course.The wretched camel-jockeys have NO right to be in the Holy Land and the sooner they catch the next magic carpet or camel sleigh to Jordan, Syria, or Egypt the better! The Israelis MUST seize this opportunity to totally turn around the whole tedious farce of the middle east. It is time to bitchslap the fetid Mohammedans into next week. Vaporize the pigs!A world without Muslims would be a lovely world indeed!”[1]

Then there is this from Australian Israeli pro-Zionist blogger Geoff Pahoff, also a regular at the popular Australian blog Webdiary, describing his thoughts on the death of the elderly wheel-chair bound spiritual leader of Palestine’s Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin:

“I celebrated wildly when that filthy bag of puss, ‘the old blind wheel-chair bound spiritual leader’ finally kissed what was left of his miserable fanny and did the world the enormous favour, albeit somewhat forced, of departing from it for all eternity. Thereby correcting a major anomaly in the order of things by being born in the first place. Or not drowned slowly at the first opportunity. The slimy ignorant lying slice of toxic shit.”[2]

Australia too has an ‘Israeli Lobby’ that uses hate speech as part of its rhetoric of lies and deceit.

Saturday, July 15, 2006

I don’t know what has happened to Cpl. Gilad Shalit. I don’t know if he was captured, or, if he was, I don’t know how he was captured. Frankly, I don’t even know that he actually exists apart from the pictures of him that we have all seen. One hopes that these are all questions that will eventually be answered.

I do know, however, that there is something extraordinarily odd about the story the Israeli Defence Force claim is behind his disappearance. In particular it’s the part about the tunnel which I can’t get to grips with.

As an engineer I’ve given the notion of digging a tunnel which the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs tells us was some 650 metres long,[1] dug under sand across the Gaza border into Israel some thought. I’m beginning to wonder whether this is actually feasible especially considering that it would have to be built covertly and across the terrain that Israel claims. A 650 metre long covert tunnel being constructed under sand is a considerable undertaking the logistics of which would be enormous. The tunnel, even a crawl tunnel measuring 900mm x 900mm in cross section, would require 100% full shoring if actually constructed in sand and at least 60% if constructed in clay/soil. That means all that shoring material, literally tonnes of it, would have to be loaded down the shaft of the tunnel head and then transported along the tunnel to the tunnel face where one man at the face would have to position it and then excavate out the next section of tunnel with all the problems that that involves in shifting the excavated material back down the tunnel to the head shaft where it would have to be disposed of. Rock would be out of the question because of the noise of hammering through it and the extra logistics of getting hammer equipment to the face.

Now, 0.9m wide x 0.9m high x 650m long tunnel would require 526 cubic metres of excavation to be removed at, say, 1.3 tonnes per cubic metre if dry, that’s 684 tonnes of dirt to dispose of. A good three-axle semi trailer would take about 30 tonnes a load so that’s about 23 semi-trailer loads.

A tunnel this size will also require ventilating. This could be done by boring vertical holes to the surface and simply casing the holes with flexible plastic pipe. However, there is a very large section of ploughed-up no-mans land that is under constant surveillance and a few bits of pipe sticking up out of the ground could arouse a suspicion that we be an unacceptable risk. Alternatively, a simple fan could be used to pump air along the tunnel but to fully ventilate a 650m long tunnel would require a fairly large fan to counter the back pressure of such a long pipe. Not impossible, but a lot of work.

The real problems in building a tunnel under these conditions is 1) the problem of disguising the head shaft of the tunnel, which could be solved by building from within an existing structure like a house or a shed, though this would not solve the problem of 2) disguising the delivery of equipment and shoring material and, worse, disposing of the excavated material.

The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs in their communiqué have included a photo-map of where they claim the incident took place and even where the tunnel is supposed to be. From this it is very easy to locate the same spot on Google Earth.[2]

The images for this area are exceptionally clear and one can see very clearly the area being referred to and the adjoining and adjacent areas including the old and now disused Gaza airport. (One can clearly see that sections of the runways have been ripped up rendering them unserviceable.) One can also see clearly the area of no-mans land between the paddocks on the Israeli side of the fence where the Israeli soldiers were said to be and the sole small building that appears to be no larger than a shed where, if a tunnel was built at all, the head shaft would be located. Running the computers cursor from the paddocks to the shed and surrounding area one will notice that elevations vary only a few feet over many hundreds of metres. In other words the land is all but flat. One will also notice that it is featureless in terms of trees. All of this means that Israeli observation conditions of the area is very good. Very little over a period of time would escape surveillance their.

The bottom line is that it would be impossible to build a tunnel, especially under these conditions of secrecy that one needs to ask; was there really a tunnel? And, if not, then what’s the real story? Why have the Israelis lied – again?

Thursday, July 13, 2006

A report in the Jerusalem Post today proves very revealing. It claims that, ‘Only weeks ago, an entire reserve division was drafted in order to train for an operation such as the one the IDF is planning in response to Wednesday morning's Hizbollah attacks on IDF forces along the northern border.’[1]

The news is revealing because it was only a little over two weeks ago that Cpl. Gilad Shalit was captured by Palestinian fighters. One needs to ask how the Israelis knew at, or even before, he was captured that it would be taking action against Hizbollah in Lebanon.This revealing piece of news comes on top of an earlier revelation that the Israelis had planned the arrest of top Palestinian Hamas leaders some time well before Shalit was captured as Ha’aretz reported: “The detention of Hamas parliamentarians in the early hours of Thursday morning had been planned several weeks ago and received approval from Mazuz on Wednesday. The same day, Shin Bet Director Yuval Diskin presented Prime Minister Ehud Olmert with the list of Hamas officials slated for detention.” [2]

This entire crisis has all the hallmarks and is beginning to unravel as a carefully orchestrated ploy to create a casus belli for Israel to attack and occupy the Gaza, neutralise Hamas, the democratically elected government of the Palestinians to deprive the Palestinians of any power to resist reoccupation of the Gaza, possibly on a permanent basis, and, at the same time, to neutralise Hizbollah in pursuit of regime change in Lebanon.

Since the Israelis are now also making noises about Syrian and even Iranian involvement in the Hizbollah actions against Israel that has prompted Israel’s attacks against Lebanon, there are indications that these noises are intended to foment US involvement in attacking Syria and Iran on Israels behalf.

If, indeed, this crisis has been orchestrated to deliberately provoke two Arab organisations to the north and south of Israel to attack Israel in an attempt to gain US involvement then the Israelis are playing an extremely dangerous game… unless, of course, the Israelis have already colluded with the US.

Wednesday, July 12, 2006

Will Howard has yet again attempted to deceive readers; this time with the illusion that Arabs are now against Palestinians defending themselves against Israeli terrorism in the Gaza. He quotes[1] the Egyptian-American right-wing pro-Zionist stooge Youssef Ibrahim, a neoconservative writer, a sort of Lord Haw-Haw of the Middle East, who has the hide to address the Palestinian people as ‘Dear Palestinian Arab Brethren’. Ibrahim then tells the Palestinian people that the war with Israel is lost and that they should surrender in order to ‘secure a future for their children.’

Will Howard then goes on to quote[2] Abdul Rahman Al-Rashed, another well known lackey of the secular pro-American Arab media who also implores the Palestinians to give up their fight.

Just to reinforce the illusion that Arabs are against the Palestinians, Will Howard then quotes[3] the Saudi journalist Yusuf Nasir Al-Suweidan, again well known for his pro-American secular stance.

All of these writers are considered outcasts and even traitors to the Palestinian cause and to the Arab world generally.

The vast majority of Arabs throughout the Middle East support the Palestinian cause. Will Howard’s presentation of these writers at the Heidelberg blog to a readership that in the main are unaware of the allegiances these Arab writers really have demonstrates the extent to which the most active member of the Israeli Lobby in Australia is prepared to lie and deceive on behalf of the right-wing pro-Zionist Israeli cause of conquering lands that do not belong to them in order to create a Greater Israel at the expense of the lives of the Palestinian people.

Monday, July 03, 2006

In the light of the Sydney Morning Herald’s revelations today, it seems that Australia didn’t got to war against Saddam Hussein because he had WMDs and was an immediate threat to the world including Australia despite Downer having told the Australian Parliament that: “While our concern about Saddam Hussein is not new, it is now more immediate. His regime's actions remain a matter of great and growing concern to the international community including Australia.”[1] It seems that the real reason for going to war against Iraq was because it was the only way Australia could guarantee our lucrative wheat trade with a post-invasion Iraq without losing it to the Americans.[2]This all goes to prove, again, what a great liar Downer is. On the very eve of war, Downer was telling Australians that the French were not backing the UN in favour of going to war for ‘political reasons’[3] implying that Australia’s motives for joining in with the US were for reasons of principle. Turns out that nothing could be further from the truth! And doesn’t that sound like a familiar story as far as Alexander Downer is concerned. Downer’s one-let out for his lies, that he had been mistaken due to being ill-advised and ill-informed, has just been shot down in flames.History will not be kind to these liars and deceivers.

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is an Aeronautical Engineer, Historian and general carer of what goes on in the world.
Apart from an earlier career in engineering, Lataan also has a First Class Honours BA degree in History and a PhD in International Politics.
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